Livestock

Food, Fiber, and Friends

Erin McKenna

Publication Year: 2018

Most livestock in America currently live in cramped and unhealthy confinement, have few stable social relationships with humans or others of their species, and finish their lives by being transported and killed under stressful conditions. In Livestock, Erin McKenna allows us to see this situation and presents alternatives. She interweaves stories from visits to farms, interviews with producers and activists, and other rich material about the current condition of livestock. In addition, she mixes her account with pragmatist and ecofeminist theorizing about animals, drawing in particular on John Dewey’s account of evolutionary history, and provides substantial historical background about individual species and about human-animal relations.

This deeply informative text reveals that the animals we commonly see as livestock have rich evolutionary histories, species-specific behaviors, breed tendencies, and individual variation, just as those we respect in companion animals such as dogs, cats, and horses. To restore a similar level of respect for livestock, McKenna examines ways we can balance the needs of our livestock animals with the environmental and social impacts of raising them, and she investigates new possibilities for human ways of being in relationships with animals. This book thus offers us a picture of healthier, more respectful relationships with livestock.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has taken a long time and the help of many people. I would like
to thank the students who worked with me and all the farmers named (and
unnamed) in the text who took time to respond to our questions and show us
their farms. Most of the work for this book took place while I was in the philosophy
department at Pacific Lutheran University. Special thanks are due to
the PLU students who worked with me: Sarah Curtis, Jonathan Stout, Danielle
Palmer, Kelli Blechschmidt, McKenzie Williams, and Gregor Uvila. McKenzie
and Danielle also contributed photographs to the project. PLU supported...

ONE Respectful Relationships: A Pragmatist Ecofeminist Take on Living with Livestock

Cold, wet, a little seasick, and thinking, “I hope we don’t die,” my students and
I were in a boat off the coast of British Columbia, headed toward a vortex that
we were told is hazardous to navigate. Apparently there had been a big rock
that got in the way of boats, so someone had the idea to blow it up. Problem
solved! But while the rock no longer posed a direct danger to boats, the swirl
of currents that took its place posed its own challenges. I thought, “Here is
an example of the bad version of ‘being pragmatic.’ Encounter an obstacle—
remove said obstacle. Without greater understanding of the context and relationships...

TWO Fish and Pragmatist Philosophy: Developing a Deweyan Ethic

When asked about livestock most people don’t think of fish. When asked
about fishing they tend to think of people catching fish with a line. Others,
aware of the realities of the fishing industry, might think of big trawlers scraping
the ocean floor and pouring the contents of their nets on the deck of a
boat—much of it just thrown away as unintentional bycatch. But, in fact,
many fish are regularly farmed and have been for quite a while. Carp were
farmed in China at least as far back as 4000 BCE, and in Europe written records
point to carp farming nine hundred years ago with very large operations...

THREE Beef Cattle: Animal Welfare and Leopold’s Land Ethic

These three advertising slogans from the Beef Council are all designed
around the idea that beef is central to what one eats and who one is. In fact,
beef consumption has been in decline in the United States. According to the
United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) website, U.S. annual consumption
increased from 28.1 to 25.5 billion pounds over the last seven years.
In 2014 people in the United States moved from eating beef more than any
other meat to eating chicken more than any other meat. Most attribute this
change to a combination of health concerns on the part of consumers and rising...

FOUR In Mixed Company: Deep Ecology, Meat Consumption, and Conservation

Today, all mainstream animal agriculture is highly specialized and segmented.
One of the ideas behind this approach is the view that it is more efficient to
focus on one kind of production, and even one aspect of that production. For
beef cattle that means specializing in breeding, birthing and weaning, feeding
and finishing, or slaughtering and processing. Most of the farmers discussed
in the previous chapter stray from the norm by taking on all aspects of the
life (and death) of the cattle. They do, however, specialize in cattle. Another
approach involves mixing species. This used to be commonplace....

FIVE Ruminating with Ruminants: Rodeos, Rights, and Respectful Use

In the book so far I have presented an approach that a pragmatist philosophy
of animal well-being, augmented by specific insights from ecofeminism,
might take when considering the current conditions of fish and cattle. I have
also presented some history regarding the introduction of livestock to the
United States, with a particular focus on cattle, to illuminate the complex interactions
livestock have with humans and with physical environments. I have
described mainstream industrial fish and cattle operations and discussed
specific examples of farmers who challenge the industrial approach in one or...

SIX Sheep and Goats: An Ecofeminist Critique of Wendell Berry and Barbara Kingsolver

Current evidence suggests that the first animal domesticated by humans is
the dog, and that this relationship is thus the longest relationship between
humans and a domesticated animal. It took longer to domesticate sheep and
goats, the ruminants those dogs help herd and protect. And now llamas, like
dogs, have become commonly used to protect herds of sheep. Domesticated
about six thousand years ago, llamas and alpacas are members of the camelid
family native to the Americas. Found in the Andes, they reside in Peru, Bolivia,
Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Ecuador. The llama was domesticated from...

SEVEN Dairies: Animal Welfare and Val Plumwood

Kingsolver’s cheesemaking drew her into the world of dairies and the history
of humans’ consumption of milk and its by-products. She expresses no real
direct concern for the dairy animals themselves. Her concern is for human
health and desire. As she notes, cheese is a way to store milk by using bacteria
to turn the liquid into a solid. Many prefer raw milk for this process, but that
can be hard to find given current regulations. Some people end up getting a
cow or a goat in order to support their interest in making cheese, but they
can’t sell the cheese without meeting strict regulations regarding where and...

EIGHT Pork Production: Pigs and Pragmatism

The human relationship with domesticated pigs goes back nine to eleven
thousand years. Domesticated in different parts of the world at different
times, pigs continue to be an important part of many cultures. Known domestication
events occurred in China, India, and Southeast Asia (Essig 35). There
is now evidence suggesting that domesticated pigs were first introduced to
Europe from China but then were replaced with pigs domesticated from European
boar (Larson et al.). Many believe that humans’ increasingly sedentary
way of life, along with their accumulated waste, attracted pigs to human settlements...

NINE Poultry Production: Chickens, “Chicks,” and Carol Adams

Pig production in the United States has copied many aspects of industrial
chicken production. It is ironic that pigs and poultry, who historically both
shared greater proximity to humans by virtue of living in the backyard, are
now the most industrialized livestock animals. While some are disturbed by
this development when it comes to pigs (given their intelligence), few share
the same level of concern for poultry, as they are considered stupid, or “birdbrained.” The long and complex relations between people and poultry (domesticated
about eight thousand years ago), however, belie this description

The killing of animals has long been a part of human existence, and that is unlikely
to change. For many, the most troubling part of raising animals for food
is that they must die. Even those animals involved in dairy and egg production
are eventually killed (not to mention the “surplus” animals produced by
those industries, who are killed at a very young age). While death is a loss of
a kind, it is an inevitable one. If done well, the killing of livestock animals can
involve little pain and suffering. To make this possible, though, on-site slaughter
involving fewer animals would need to be the norm, and social groups...

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